Gregory M. Ledet

Yesterday was my appointment with the GI PA, but I just couldn’t make it.  The car was acting up, and so was my stomach.  She ended up calling me and we went over my latest blood tests, so I guess I’ll go over them with you guys now!

Everything looks par for the course with this treatment.  White count and red count are both low, as is hematocrit.  Albumin is high as well.  My AST is 67 and my ALT is 58 (slightly higher than last time, but I’ll chalk that up to changing my pain meds from Vicoprofen to Percocet and the APAP in it).  The AST is high, but not bad.  The one that stuck out was my TSH.

The normal range for TSH is 0.47 to 4.68 and mine came in at 5.85.  It’s not terribly high, but my hep doc wanted me to talk with my family doc about it, so I went in to talk with her today.  Let me explain this TSH thing to you guys.

The thyroid gland produces thyroid hormone. When it functions properly, the thyroid is part of a feedback loop with your pituitary gland. First, the pituitary senses the level of thyroid hormone that the thyroid has released into the bloodstream. The pituitary then releases a special messenger hormone, known as “Thyroid Stimulating Hormone” (abbreviated as TSH). TSH stimulates the thyroid to release more thyroid hormone.

When the thyroid, for whatever reason — illness, stress, surgery, obstruction, or, in this case, peginterferon therapy — does not produce enough thyroid hormone, the pituitary detects this reduction in thyroid hormone, and it moves into action. The pituitary then makes MORE TSH, to help trigger the thyroid to produce more thyroid hormone. This is the pituitary’s effort to return the system to “normal” and normalize thyroid function. There, a TSH that is higher than normal suggests a thyroid that is underactive and not doing its job of producing thyroid hormone.

Thyroid dysfunction is normal for people to experience during interferon therapy.  Because of this, my family doc isn’t too concerned at this point, but she wants to run some more tests.  I’m going to have T₃ and T₄ test done tomorrow morning to see exactly what the thyroid hormone levels look like.  I’m also having a lipid panel done, so I need to be fasting to have it done, hence the reason for tomorrow morning.

Hopefully everything works out OK and I don’t have to spend the rest of my life taking Synthroid.  My wife had her thyroid removed years back, and I’m not looking forward to that.  So, that’s about it for now.  Other than that stuff, and a change from Zoloft to Wellbutrin, it’s been pretty normal.  I have been a bit edgier than normal, and more prone to anger, but I’m trying to keep that under control.  I know that I just over a month left to go on this, so I can’t wait for it to be over.  Once this treatment is over, you can bet that there’s going to be a party somewhere!

Yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve posted.  I’ve been busy as hell, not to mention feeling like hell.  The treatment has really been taking it’s toll on me.  I guess you can say that the interferon has killed off all the bad stuff and now it’s starting to kill off the good stuff, namely me.  Here’s a little update on what’s been going on.

I’ve been working hard on trying to get Le’ Day Consulting up and running, but it’s been hard with the treatment.  I’ve got a couple of clients out there, but it’s a little slow.  On top of that, the treatment has everything in my system running low.  My white blood cell count is 2.4.  The normal range is 4.8 – 10.8.  So basically, I’m immunocompromised.  My red count is on the low side; 4.23 and a normal range of 4.60 – 6.20.  Hemoglobin and Hematocrit are both low as well.  The only things that aren’t low are my AST and ALT.  My AST is 59 and my ALT is 79, which are better than what they were last month.  They were 78 and 83 respectively.  My liver is getting better, but my body is falling apart.

The virus is still undetectable in my body!  That is excellent news!  Let’s just hope that I can achieve SVR and not have to worry about this crap again once I’m done with treatment.  I’ve been through 17 injections now and 16 weeks of treatment, so hopefully I only have 8 more weeks to go and I’m done with this.  I’ve made it this far, so there’s no way in hell I’m going to give up now, no matter how bad I’m feeling!

On a completely different subject… THE SAINTS ARE WORLD CHAMPS!!!!  I still can’t believe it!  The USA set a Winter Olympic record of 37 metals and Canada set a record with 14 GOLD metals, so both Jasmine and I are very happy with our countries right now.  I’ve been throwing around the idea of getting another Anschutz, specifically this one, and start shooting again with hopes that I’d be able to make the Olympic team again.  The only problem is that target rifles are extremely expensive and so is all the travel that you have to pay for to go around the country to competition.  I remember that I had a blast back in 1996 and with shooting, you really don’t need to be 18 years old to keep up with the field.  It’s the only Olympic sport I’d have a shot at making (pun intended).

I find it kinda funny that right before the Saints won the Super Bowl, the northern part of the US had to deal with Snowpocalypse.  Washington DC was under 3 feet of snow in one day, so I guess you can say Hell froze over!  We had a shitload of snow here as well. That Friday of all the bad snow we got 14 inches and over the past 30 days we’ve had about 2½ feet of snow.  That’s set a record for Logan County.  Mad River Mountain, the ski resort here, must have been happy as all hell for all of that show!

Well, that’s about it for now.  The treatment is working, I’m dying, Al Gore is lying, the Saints won, and the USA kicked ass.  Until next time, peace!

-Greg

Today started off horribly.  The doorbell rang at 10:30 and I was still sleeping, seeing as I didn’t go to bed until 4am.  I knew my wife was downstairs, but I still wanted to see what was going on.  I made the first step and my feet slipped out from under me.  Down the stairs I went.

Not a good pic, but click for larger image

I screwed up my arms pretty good, but that’s just the part I can show you here.  My lower back and and tail bone are destroyed.  My neck is killing me.  It hurt like hell when it happened, and now it’s getting worse as everything tightens up.  I only thought that I wasn’t doing good with the treatment, now I have this to contend with.  Trust me when I tell you… I’m in a shitload of pain.  The best part about it?  The doorbell was UPS delivering more Pegasys.  I went through pain to take delivery of pain.  It was so loud when I fell down the stairs that the neighbors came running over to see if I needed help.  I couldn’t move for about 10 minutes.

While I was sitting here in pain I tried to get some things done knowing that I have company arriving tomorrow and I had a doctor’s appointment today at 3 and it was going to take an hour and a half to get to the doctor’s office.  This is where to good day comes into play.  The doctor’s appointment was my first meeting with the PA that will be taking care of me during my Hepatitis treatment.  It was also my first look at the blood work I’ve had done since I started treatment.  We got to the office and everything went OK at first.  We went over the CBC and CMP info and I was informed that my white count was a little low, but my AST and ALT were looking better!

Click the image for full spreadsheet containing values

For those of you that don’t know, the AST and ALT are liver enzymes. Liver enzymes allow doctors to learn about the health of your liver. There are thousands of these enzymes in the liver and blood stream, but two of them — known as AST and ALT — are especially useful for determining the severity of liver disease.  When liver cells are damaged, AST and ALT are “leaked” into the blood stream.  The amount of these enzymes give the doctor an idea of just how screwed up your liver is.  When the levels are high it causes concern because the liver isn’t functioning the way it should.  In simple terms: if AST and ALT are high, that’s BAD.  Liver enzymes are like golf scores.  By looking at the teal and orange lines in the chart above, you’ll get an idea of what my liver enzymes have been doing this year.  I started treatment on Nov. 20th, so they have gone down since then.  Click that chart and bring up the full numbers and the spreadsheet.  Lots of info in there, including the numbers that you need to make that chart look right.

So, now we know that my liver is working a little better because they’ve gone down since my last test.  This is a GOOD thing, but it isn’t what I wanted to know.  I wanted to know my Viral Load.  That’s the test that I needed.  It’s going to give me a number and that number is the amount of virus found within a given volume of blood.  My last test, in September, gave me a viral load of 1,720,000 IU/mL.  That mean there’s 1.7 million of those little viruses swimming around in that vial of blood.  I had the viral load done again on the 21st and, I’m happy to say, it came back UNDETECTABLE!  That’s right!  The HCV RNA was not detectable in a range of 43 IU/mL to 69,000,000 IU/mL.  It could still be there, but it’s less than 43 IU/mL.  The next test I’m going to have done will be able to detect it down to 10 IU/mL.  If it’s not detected there, then it’ll be save to say that I’m kicking it’s ASS.  Or at least, I’ve kicked at least 1,719,957 of their asses so far.

5 more months of treatment and it’ll be looking VERY good for me attaining SVR.  This is what this treatment is all about.  It’s about it working.  It’s about me beating it and not letting it beat me.  And this is also help for all of you out there that are looking into starting treatment.  There is hope!  I’m a guy that started treatment before and stopped after 4 weeks.  I had well over a year to let the virus mutate on me and build an immunity to the treatment, but it didn’t.  It’s still getting it’s ass kicked, and as am I.

Speaking of getting my ass kicked, falling down the stairs this morning really sucked.  My body is really starting to tense up and hurt like hell.  I’m eating pain pills right now like mentos just trying to take the edge off.  I mean hell… I sat on my nuts when I fell.  Yes, my full 240 lbs of weight landed on my testicles as I was dropping down the stairs. It still really hurts…  Not to mention that I popped a cyst on my kidneys when I fell (I have Polycystic Kidney Disease too) and I’ve been pissing blood all afternoon.

I’m still going to keep updating this blog, especially with info on my blood tests and everything.  But the question still remains… How do you feel my day went.  Was it a good day?  Was it a bad day?  Or, was it just Tuesday?